The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  The Goldsmiths, the Grassmanns, Rebecca and Jacob Mandelbaum dined with us some days later, my efforts to convey the impression that Venetia was their hostess being defeated by Venetia herself who, as each course was brought in, made some remark of delighted but tell-tale surprise. Yet she made herself very pleasant to the shrill, Mrs. Goldsmith, sitting beside her in the drawing-room after the meal and listening with an almost mesmerized attentiveness—in fact the daze of a crushing boredom—to that lady’s particular theories on the culinary and domestic arts, agreeing with eager nods of her auburn head each time Mrs. Goldsmith paused for breath or demanded ‘Is that not so?’

  Miss Mandelbaum played and sang for us, Mr. Jacob Mandelbaum, a cultured and worldly man, talked music and landscape, and managed, with a fine discretion, to prevent his sister from asking me why my husband was not present, since it must have been clear from the odd number at my table that he had been expected.

  The gentlemen from Hamburg and Berlin remained in the drawing-room for a very long time with Gideon, smoking cigars and discussing, almost with love, the intricacies of finance at an exalted level where money was not for spending but for manipulation, a world-wide chess game which Gideon, with the Barforth fortune behind him and his own fierce ambitions driving him towards the making of another, might one day be invited to play.

  ‘When you are next in Berlin—’ Mr. Goldsmith said, taking Gideon’s hand in both of his at parting.

  ‘You will find much in Hamburg to interest you,’ said Mr. Grassmann.

  ‘Lord!’ said Venetia when they were all safely gone. ‘Do tell me—am I not heroic?’

  And meeting Gideon’s cool eyes, the lift of his eyebrows that plainly said, ‘Heroic? Just barely adequate, I’d call it’, I saw her own brows come together in a frown, her pointed face flush with a rare loss of temper.

  ‘All right,’ she said, squaring her slight shoulders, her back very straight. ‘You have no need to tell me. I have not been heroic. I have simply been a hypocrite. Is that what you want from me?’

  She had never allowed herself to be really angry with him before, had been too quick, if anything, to agree with his every opinion, to accommodate his least desire, but now, after a slight start of surprise, he merely sighed as one does when dealing with a troublesome child.

  ‘Venetia, must you be so enthusiastic?’ And we were in no doubt that he had used the word in its Listonby and Mayfair sense of ‘brash’, ‘melodramatic’, ‘middle-class’.

  ‘Oh, don’t play the squire with me, Gideon,’ she told him, ‘although truly it is what you are.’

  ‘Is this necessary, Venetia?’

  ‘Indeed it is, for I wish to know if I have pleased you. I have spent the evening flattering a woman I dislike and who dislikes me, for the purpose—if I understand aright—of procuring you an invitation to her house in Berlin. Not because you care two straws for her or for her husband, but because he might be of use to you. Is that what I have been doing?’

  ‘Is it? I rather thought you had been giving a dinner-party, or that Grace had been giving one on your behalf. Why all this fuss, Venetia?’

  ‘Because I want to know if I have done well. Have you got your invitation? Is this what you want from me?’

  And for what seemed to me a very long time, during which I longed to leave the room and frankly dared not desert her, he did not reply.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said at last and taking a cigar lit it, inhaled with calm enjoyment, his attention apparently caught by the gracefully curving spiral of tobacco. But the silence was too much for Venetia—as he had intended—and taking a deep breath she raised herself on tiptoe, attempting, I suppose, to match his height and suddenly threw at him, ‘Damnation—yes, I mean damnation! Do you know, Gideon, I believe I would think better of you if you wanted to make love to that woman, if you found her desirable instead of just a stepping stone to her husband’s good graces. Yes, if you desired her, I could understand it. You see—you wrinkle your nose at the thought of it, don’t you, which means you don’t like her either.’

  ‘It means I am appalled by your manners, or lack of them.’

  ‘No, it does not. It means I have made you look at her and admit she is an old harpy—for so she is. But I ask myself, does that matter to you: Would it matter if—’ And I could hear on the tip of her tongue—as he could surely hear them—the words that must never be spoken: ‘If you had to make love to her, Gideon, to get what you want, would you go so far? Would it be no more and no less a hardship to you than making love to me?’

  No one, of course, in the complexity of human relationships can ever be entirely right or wholly wrong. Gideon was a hard, ambitious man—qualities much valued in Cullingford who expected no more than he had been brought up to expect from a wife. He had seen his mother devote the whole of her formidable energies to creating at Listonby an atmosphere which attracted influential men like bees to clover; men, need it be said, who could be of service, not to Aunt Caroline herself, but to her husband and to her sons. He had seen Aunt Faith drop everything at the sight of a telegram from Uncle Blaize and, not caring what engagements she cancelled nor whom she offended, set off on the hundred or thousand-mile journey to join him. He had seen Mrs. Sheldon force herself, entirely against her nature, to make public speeches in her husband’s praise, giving up her own friends and her own occupation as a landscape painter to devote herself to the humdrum work of the constituency in order that Thomas Sheldon M.P. might be at liberty to bask in the delights of Westminster. He knew that Mrs. Rawnsley, who was neither particularly kind nor particularly clever, would nevertheless defend in any drawing-room or at any tea-table the interests of Mr. Septimus Rawnsley, her not particularly faithful husband, and had sense enough to make herself very pleasant to all those who transacted their business through Rawnsley’s Bank. And these ladies were not making sacrifices. They were simply doing what they ought to be doing. They were keeping their marriage vows.

  In the beginning he had been surprisingly patient and even now, when patience was growing fragile at its borders, remained conscious of his responsibilities. He would, I believe, have been ready to give Venetia every conceivable luxury, would have enjoyed seeing her swathed in sables and dripping diamonds, not so much as evidence of his generosity but of the fact that he—the third son of a baronet—could afford them. He would have allowed her to travel too, as often as she had a mind, since he lacked the middle-class notion that husband and wife should never be apart. He would not have objected too strenuously had she acquired her mother’s passion for the hunt, so long as she hunted with ‘decent’people and took care always to be well mounted and well dressed. He would have turned a blind or an indulgent eye to the occasional card-party, since useful acquaintances can be made at a fashionable whist-table, providing she took the trouble to wear an expensive gown and did not lose too much. She could have stayed in bed all morning, like Blanche, while he went to the mill to earn their daily portion of caviar and champagne, had he been able to rely on finding her, vivacious and hospitable, at his dinner-table at night.

  But Gideon’s ambitions, while not incomprehensible to Venetia, irritated her, increasing her feeling of alienation. She understood money and knew there was plenty of it. Why, then, should she devote her one, precarious, already blemished life to the task of making it grow? What concerned her was the quality of life, not its luxury. What she most desired was an intense and demanding relationship which would test her ingenuity and stretch her resources to the full, an emotional crusade requiring the investment of her whole heart. And she could see no similarity between these fierce longings and the driving force of Gideon’s ambition which could not be content with the fortune his uncle and his wife had brought him, which goaded him into a crusade of his own.

  Grand in his ideas, lavish in his tastes, it pleased his vanity—that touchiness of a younger son for whom no provision has been made—to consider the splendid Barforth mills as no more than a starting point. He had not been bo
rn a manufacturer. The rules of primogeniture had forced him to it and from the first he had determined to conduct himself with style, to lift himself by his own efforts from the confines of grubby, middle-class Cullingford to a plane where business was conducted by gentlemen. After all, it had been a Rothschild—a prince not of the blood but of commerce—who had enabled the British government to purchase its controlling interest in the Suez Canal, and although Gideon had no interest in politics himself, his brother Sir Dominic was soon to take his seat in the House of Commons behind the flamboyant Mr. Disraeli, and there was no reason why the Chards, if the game was played aright, should not attain influence in the land. Blanche would play her part in that game, Aunt Caroline would glory in it. But if Venetia could be brought to understand it at all, she would be very likely to enquire, ‘What’s the good of it? What does it matter? It’s not even real.’

  She may well have been right. I did not set myself to judge, merely to perform, each day, the tasks I found to hand, the building of a facade which screened us all but which only Gideon seemed to appreciate.

  ‘That menu was exceedingly well chosen, Grace.’

  ‘Thank you, Gideon.’

  ‘Tell me—how did you get on with Frank Brewster’s wife over coffee?’

  ‘Famously. She believes she will never survive the journey to New York next week.’

  ‘So they are going to New York, are they? Now why—I wonder—did Brewster forget to mention that?’

  ‘Well—they are staying with the Ellison-Turnbulls.’

  ‘Are they, by God? Thank you, Grace.’

  And so it continued.

  I became, that year and the year after, an obsessive housekeeper and hostess, a great compiler of lists and designer of domestic routines. I kept files in date order of my menus and my invitations, so that no dish was ever served to the same guests twice over. I kept files on the guests themselves, their gastronomic and personal preferences, the names of their children, their enemies and their friends. I made it my business to know which notable would be arriving in Cullingford, having found a reliable informant at the Station Hotel, and if Gideon wished to meet them I never failed to find the correct approach, or to make the impression he desired. It became a challenge, finally a compulsion, my pride in discovering the favourite wine of a total stranger, his wife’s favourite flower, and having both in plentiful supply when they came to dine, outweighing by far its object.

  My aims had reduced themselves perhaps—in fact, they were much reduced—but were altogether ‘in keeping’with my status, a perfect dinner-party, the organization of a charity ball at which I walked roughshod over any lady who dared to question my authority taking on the importance of the Balkan Crisis, not because I cared about charity balls but because this—unlike my relationship with Gervase—was a matter in which I could be certain of success. The reality of my marriage was a hollow sham. The illusion it created was still very widely admired. It was the illusion which, of necessity, counted.

  I sat at my dinner-table one summer evening, enjoying the rose-scented air through the open windows, knowing that everything in this huge, ornate house that should be polished had been polished most thoroughly, that every item of linen requiring starch was starched to perfection, every inch of upholstery meticulously brushed. I knew my larder shelves were full, my drawers and cupboards scented with sweet herbs and lavender, my staff respectful and respectable, even the beds where the kitchenmaids slept supplied with good mattresses and warm blankets.

  I was surrounded by order and efficiency, I was at the centre of a beehive of ongoing tasks which I knew would be well done. And if the running of this house was a small matter compared to the running of the Barforth and Agbrigg mills—to the affairs of the real world outside—then at least no one, I believed, could have done it better. I was making a constructive effort of my life—as some others were not—and whenever it troubled me that the effort was really very small, that Grace Agbrigg, surely, with her flair for mathematics and languages, had been capable of far more than this, it seemed wiser and safer to belittle that flair, to shrink my capabilities, to narrow myself down to fit the reality of my situation; and be content.

  There was no conversation at table that night, Venetia staring listlessly at the white brocade wall, Gideon’s mind on facts and figures, Gervase leaning back in his chair, eating little, saying not a word. And when their silence oppressed me I began to tell them whatever came into my mind, Aunt Faith’s return from Paris, a dinner at Mrs. Rawnsley’s the night before, when her parlourmaid had spilled a decanter of wine on a brand-new carpet.

  ‘What rotten luck!’ said Gideon whose training as a gentleman always enabled him to produce some sort of reply.

  ‘Mmmmmm,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Yes, terrible luck, for the carpet is pale green and the wine, as you might imagine, was red. I am not at all sure the stain can be removed.’

  Gervase leaned towards me, his face very pale in the twilight, his eyes carefully narrowed, his mouth touched by a smile that deceived me, since he was not much given to smiling these days.

  ‘Grace,’ he said very distinctly, ‘what a bore you are.’

  To which I coolly and to no one in particular replied, ‘Do you know, I believe this sauce is much improved by that dash of tarragon. I must remember to tell cook.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  One night the following autumn, my maid, Sally Grimshaw, who had been given permission to attend a wedding, did not return, her absence being only grudgingly explained to me by Mrs. Winch, my housekeeper, who did not seem to think it my concern. The girl, while walking back to Tarn Edge alone at what could not be called a respectable hour of the night, had been ‘set upon’by some unknown male, and as a result of her injuries had been taken by a constable to the Infirmary. The constable had then been kind enough to inform Mrs. Winch, who for her part saw no reason to trouble me. Sally would be missed, of course, but either Mary-Ann or Martha-Jane would be able to do my hair and mend my linen and should they not give satisfaction Mrs. Winch knew an agency which could be trusted to supply a proper lady’s maid at short notice.

  What injuries? Not serious. Shock, mainly, thought Mrs. Winch, and the cuts and bruises one would expect after such an affray. But I must remember that she had been ‘set upon’, after all, by a man she said she had not recognized, although there was no way to be sure of that.

  ‘You mean she has been raped?’

  ‘Yes, madam, I do.’

  And she was very angry with me, I could tell, for using the word, even angrier when I ordered my carriage and went off to see for myself.

  Cullingford’s Infirmary, at the top of steep, cobbled Sheepgate, was an old and inconvenient building, clean enough since Miss Florence Nightingale had taught us that, if hospitals could not always cure the sick, they should not by their filth and squalor actually do them harm. But it was equipped as sparsely as a workhouse, black iron bedsteads pushed close together against a stark white wall, cheerless, not intended for the affluent who would be nursed at home, but for the poor, the vagrant, the disgraced, who for one reason or another were homeless. And what disturbed me most about Sally was not the evidence of a brutal beating but her fear.

  I was interviewed with barely adequate courtesy by the physician in charge, an elderly, ill-tempered, possibly overworked man who, like Mrs. Winch, did not really know what I was doing here and had no time and certainly no patience with my indignation. There was in his view no need to make a fuss. After all, these things occurred with enormous, in fact with tedious regularity and he had seen worse—far worse—than Sally, who had broken no bones and lost no teeth.

  ‘My dear lady,’ he said finally, his tolerance at an end, ‘one must take a rational view. Your sympathy does you credit, but the young woman was alone in a questionable area of the city at an advanced hour of the night. In such circumstances any woman must expect to be molested. Her assailant no doubt mistook her for a prostitute.’

  ‘I see.
It is permissible, then, to rape a prostitute?’

  He raised a dry, somewhat disgusted eyebrow.

  ‘Madam—I would consider it to be something of an impossibility.’

  ‘I cannot agree.’

  ‘Indeed? It astonishes me, Mrs. Barforth, that you—as a gentlewoman—should have any views on the matter at all. And I will give you a further piece of advice. You would do well not to trouble our constabulary with a sorry episode such as this, for if that young woman’s assailant was really unknown to her, she cannot name him; and if he was not the stranger she claims, then she will not name him. These incidents are best left to settle themselves. Good-day to you, Mrs. Barforth.

  I took Sally back to Tarn Edge in the victoria, Mrs. Winch greeting me with tight-lipped disapproval. Did I realize, she wondered, the extra work involved, the trays to be carried upstairs, the hot water, the bed linen? And when I reminded her that we had had sick maids before who had not been turned outdoors like stray kittens, she folded her hands, drew a deep breath and compressed her lips even further.

  ‘I wonder, madam, if you have considered the effect of this on—well—the others?’

  ‘Why should there be any effect at all, Mrs. Winch?’

  ‘Because she is not suffering from influenza, madam, or a sprained ankle. In fact we cannot be sure what she is suffering from.’

  ‘Mrs. Winch, what do you mean by that?’

  ‘I will tell you, madam. I keep these girls well under control. I think you will agree with that, and it is essential they should be controlled. But most of them are naturally flighty, and a thing like this can only arouse their curiosity. They will be around her bed, mark my words, like bees round honey, asking their silly questions, letting it all go to their heads and neglecting their work. And we have men-servants too, Mrs. Barforth, please do not forget that. It is difficult enough, at the best of times, to preserve the decencies in these large households, and one cannot expect these young footmen to treat a girl who has—well, they will not treat her as they treat the others, you may take my word for it. I cannot think it right to take her back and I believe you will find the girl herself does not wish to stay.’